For sale, Planet Earth, The Solar System, Orion Arm, The Milky Way. This planet, filled with abundant life and suggestion of spirit-force, is slightly used but has great potential. Prospective buyers will notice some wear at the Poles, difficulty with the air-conditioning, considerable habitat loss, coral bleaching, and species extinction due to short-term thinking from […]
Category: Poetry
In a World Where Birth is a Time for Grief as Soon as She Knows – Paul Brookes
she will not forego it.Happy for it to chew on darkness, drink fetid air, have bloated ribs.She will starve it.She buys the black lace dress,gossamer veil:a frail black rosefor her pregnancy.Her spouse cowersin the corners of her busyness,helps where she’ll allow,through her stony hail of“You’ve condemned me to this.”He traces the conceptionof the […]
Morning Glories and Mint Juleps – David Spicer
The marauders baked like clay vasesunder the sun, dangling from the largestbare oak Blanche and I found: Peter,she said, I love these rustlers and killersjerking around forever, but next timeit’s sledgehammers and throat cutters.Vegans, we still valued our longhorns,herded them to boxcars. Eighty head—a lot of money to feed orphans.We wrestled with the moral […]
Fretensis – Dennis Villelmi (read by Eric Robert Nolan)
Fretensis 1 Excerpts – Fretensis 2 excerpts – Fretensis 3 excerpts –
She Swallowed the Sun – Jake Tringali
beautiful and twisted, ten-thousand pairs of solar flares looped outward from the photosphere. they sprayed and ejected and multiplied. beneath each of those flares hid arcs of electromagnetic energy, curved through spacetime. each arc flexed and whipped outward in its violence. running asymptotically through each arc, in knotted dimensions, was a shadow of an equation, […]
Afore “Get Lost!” None – Paul Brookes
tells me owt.I’ll keep it short.Folk don’t reckon.Soft in the head. To share’s forbidden.Grip my hand, ladfor soresand livelong pain.Smell this breath,for rotten airthat’ll make you gip.Others are stench.Others touch, poison.Use ’em.Abuse ’em.In face swearersdo my head. Spoutin’ “I’m your mate.”“You’re me dad.”“I love you.”“You’re family.”Abusers. Shop ’em.Don’t come close again, lad.These boots are fedon […]
Eating from an Imaginary Spoon – Allison Grayhurst
Sensual as clay laced with warm water, hard as a window barred – and still the seeds are thrown though I don’t know why – there is too much earth and almost no sun, there are slimy ponds that beasts and fowls eliminate in – spotted with dead-fish-eyes and not at all like heaven is […]
Visitor – David Spicer
Good morning. Call me Visitor.I won’t torment you by quotingyour Book of Revelation oroverwhelm you with diatribesabout racial and religiousdivisions, for you’re all fools.I won’t surprise youwith an invite to my chaletsand their spreads, won’ttreat you with your kid glovesor a meal of goulash perfectedin a taxi’s backseat. But feel freeto tickle me in […]
TIES AND DRESS SHIRTS ARE NO LONGER REQUIRED – Colin James
Abused and tortured, acrimoniously displayed on Dragon Poles, some of us were able to get a leg up bodies into the wind, like flags or something. Others were a disappointment still standing on end. Of course the crowd complained withheld their encouragement, only cheering […]
Roach – Wayne F. Burke
I drove all night10 hours,central Florida, Northmy two buddies passed-outin the seatsthe Volkswagen Beetle enginehummingthe black nightthe bugs hitting the windshieldlike ping pong ballsI smoked a roachthe car began to floatthe road a golden pathwaya Donna Summer songon the radioI felt like the only personin the worldawakein the land of the snakeand crocodileon the […]